The New York Times reports on a new ailment plaguing many Americans, Cyberchondria. Here are the symptoms:

On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on popular search engines as well as a survey of the company’s employees.The
study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads
Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them. The
researchers said they had undertaken the study as part of an effort to
add features to Microsoft’s search service that could make it more of
an adviser and less of a blind information retrieval tool.

Although
the term “cyberchondria” emerged in 2000 to refer to the practice of
leaping to dire conclusions while researching health matters online,
the Microsoft study is the first systematic look at the anxieties of
people doing searches related to health care, Eric Horvitz said. Mr.
Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research,
said many people treated search engines as if they could answer
questions like a human expert. “People tend to look at just the first couple results,” Mr. Horvitz said. “If they find ‘brain tumor’ or ‘A.L.S.,’ that’s their launching point.” . . . .

They found that Web searches for things like headache and chest pain
were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing
serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses
are much more rare. For example, there were just as many
results that linked headaches with brain tumors as with caffeine
withdrawal, although the chance of having a brain tumor is
infinitesimally small.

The researchers said they had not
intended their work to send the message that people should ignore
symptoms. But their examination of search records indicated that
researching particular symptoms often led quickly to anxiousness.They
found that roughly 2 percent of all Web queries were health-related,
and about 250,000 users, or about a quarter of the sample, engaged in a
least one medical search during the study. About a third of the subjects “escalated” their follow-up searches to explore serious illnesses, the researchers said. . . . .